Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/260

248 such an expansive hour as this, than when wind and rain are lashing them. What preyer spares the prey because of the divine beauty of the quiet and the hush?'

'Yes, it is illusion, I know; everything is illusion. There is only one certainty.'

It was Randal's turn to smile.

'Then you don't believe,' he said,

'that death must be Like all the rest, a mockery'?

Wilson shook his head.

'Not in the least,' he said. 'If it is not the extinction of the ego, then it is nothing, and that is the one—the great desideratum.'

'Of the conscious ego, you mean?'

'Yes, of the conscious ego.'

'But isn't it almost as hateful to think that, by the law of the conservation of energy, our entities—I mean the whole sum-total of us, body and soul—are perpetually jumbled up, created, dispersed, re-created, and re-dispersed for ever? Death as annihilation is just as much an illusion as anything else.'

'Not so far as the conscious ego is concerned, and not even altogether so far as the unconscious ego. I never could understand the application which you make of the law of the conservation of energy. We are far from being able to assert that matter is eternal.